A Grey Day in Stafford

It was difficult to get a nice picture of the façade of Stafford station. Partly this was because local road and building configurations made it tricky, but mostly it was because the frontage at Stafford station is just not very attractive. As an example of 1960s, Brutalist architecture, it’s about the worst I can remember seeing in a railway context. The view opposite of the well-tended public park was much more uplifting. Proponents obviously considered that unrelieved, functional concrete was the antithesis to all previous attractive architectural styles, so they succeeded big-time here. Even the attendant brickwork was grey. To make the point, a large wall facing platform one, which may not have been grey enough to begin with, had subsequently been given a good coat of dark grey paint to ensure it fitted in.

On the station and under an overcast sky, it was left to the modern railway rolling stock and locomotives in their various company liveries to provide the splashes of colour. The station was busy, both from the point of view of passengers coming and going, but also from the action on the WCML. Serving as a junction to the north for the Manchester via Stoke route and to the south for London and the south west via Birmingham, there was plenty of changing of trains going on.

I asked a gaggle of spotters parked in a bus shelter affair on the island platform, three and four, to confirm the identities of the various Class 66s that I’d passed during my journey from Nuneaton on one of the nippy semi-fast Class 350 units that operate between Crewe and Euston. They were obviously stuck to their seats for the day but they kindly came up with the relevant goods to confirm that my eye sight was not as bad as I’d feared. It struck me that as there was plenty of room on the EMU, both ways, this was because they run them as eight coach affairs [two x four cars], a refreshing change from overcrowded cross-country services serving a string of sizable towns and cities with much shorter trains, which often seems to be the case.